Tretakoff Musings

Very cool feature from Yahoo! Sports, when you play their Fantasy Football game: they use a company to create simulated news stories , based on your fantasy performance in the week. Hadn't seen this before, but, now that my team has advanced to the Super Bowl (against my brother in law), I was amused by the simultaneous pseudo fame, as well as the rueful harbinger for the automated threat to journalism. On to next week's big game! Go Cowboys! Playoffs: Marin Cowboys Brings Down SB CHAMPS G-MEN Marin Cowboys (10-5) 117.14 SB CHAMPS G-MEN (9-6) 86.64 Alfred Morris put up 21.30 points and Julio Jones scored 21.20 as Marin Cowboys beat SB CHAMPS G-MEN, 117.14 - 86.64. Marin Cowboys has been just plain unbeatable and has now won seven straight. This win avenges a 90.38 - 77.68 loss to SB CHAMPS G-MEN back in Week 8. Marin Cowboys Smooth Moves With 21.30 points against a projected 13.63, Alfred Morris ranked ninth in the league in scoring and has now overachieved in four...

A pretty disturbing news story today from my old hometown of Newton, MA. In essence, a 44 year old Chinese woman from the sheltered town of Newton went shopping for a few iPhones in New Hampshire...and ended up writhing on the ground, tasered by two local police officers. Read that again. Now, clearly there are more details to this: The main "issue" is that the woman tried to buy more than 2 iPhones. Apple's policy is only 2. They told her "no." She claims to not have understood, but the Apple store folks say she was being obstinate, and refused to leave. The woman claims to not understand English. She's 44, lives in Newton, MA (a pretty upscale suburb of Boston), is engaged to a resident there, so it's probably a longshot that she did not understand "no." The woman allegedly had $16k in cash on her at the time. The real story behind this is that Apple is trying to clamp down on the fact that some markets do not yet have the iPhone 5...